This book is the story of how Gabriel García Márquez—a middle-class costeño from Colombia’s Caribbean coast, a law-school dropout with strong literary aspirations, whose career in journalism included stints at some of the major newspapers of Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Bogotá, and whose left-leaning views put him at odds with the dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953–57)—came to write a masterpiece that, almost in a single stroke, reconfigured the cultural map of Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century.
I remember vividly the rainy afternoon in my native Mexico City when I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude, finishing it in a dizzying twenty-four-hour session. It was April 1982, and I was in my early twenties. I had had an aversion to books (I was the outdoorsy kind) until I discovered the novel as a literary genre, and, specifically, the work of the so-called El Boom, writers from Latin America who belonged to my father’s generation (most of whom were born between 1909 and 1942), whose narratives were still hypnotizing the world. But no book by this cadre of myth-makers (the term was coined by the British man of letters V. S. Pritchett) compared remotely to One Hundred Years of Solitude, a veritable lesson in what a friend described as lo neobarroco, the neo-baroque style that defined the literature from the region. I didn’t just read it; I devoured it.
I was on my bed, near the window. I remember going to the bathroom twice. And I recall reaching chapter eighteen, with only two more to go before the end, as the sun began to rise. I was dumbstruck. Could a novel really be this good?
We retain forever the memory of the moment when certain books imposed themselves on us because nothing feels the same afterward. That afternoon I went to Librería Gandhi on Avenida Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, a favorite haunt of mine, bought every García Márquez title I could find, and binged on them for weeks. I was impressed by the carefully constructed Caribbean reality of despair. The Colombian author, it seemed to me, was looking at my own milieu, el mundo hispánico, with fresh eyes. What fascinated me in particular was that he wasn’t an urbane, cosmopolitan intellectual like my other role model, Jorge Luis Borges, whose oeuvre revolved around philosophical conundrums.
In my opinion, there are only two novelistic masterpieces written in Spanish whose influence radically revamped our understanding of Hispanic civilization: Cervantes’s Don Quixote and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Don Quixote accomplished it with its mordant critique of a seventeenth-century Iberian empire. It offered an Erasmian celebration of free thought defined by misadventures abroad and a zealous Catholic Inquisition at home and across the Atlantic. The masterful One Hundred Years of Solitude is a sweeping genealogical narrative about an entire continent and its people: its corrupt politicians, its religious aspirations, its gender disparity, and its natural and historical calamities. Like Cervantes’s opus, which is purportedly written by a Moor, García Márquez’s novel is presented as a palimpsest: a manuscript drafted by a gypsy. What is one to make of the fact that such fringe social types in the Spanish-speaking world are the creators of the two literary pillars on which it stands?
García Márquez, then a little-known novelist, wrote the book over an eighteen-month period, in seclusion, in Mexico City, not too far from where I lived. Released in Buenos Aires in 1967 by Editorial Sudamericana, it was the most important novel ever to be published in the Americas. It follows the fanciful Buendía family of Macondo, a small, forgotten town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, over the course of more than a century (in spite of the title), from the mythical foundation of the town to its demise. The cyclical structure of the plot, its omniscient, third-person narrative, and the magical nature of the incidents chronicled fill the book with biblical resonances. At its core is the most basic of biblical curses: incest. The Buendías are born of incest and forever condemned by it. There is language that recalls the Tower of Babel, sibling rivalries like those of Cain and Abel and Joseph and his brothers, larger-than-life imperial figures such as Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who bring to mind the kings of Israel, as well as magical illnesses such as an epidemic of insomnia and disasters like a rainstorm of butterflies that are reminiscent of the plagues.
Symmetrically divided into twenty unnumbered chapters of approximately eight thousand words each, it includes a cast of three dozen characters delineated with great confidence. Pick your favorite: Remedios the Beauty, whose elegiac loveliness enables her to ascend to heaven; Úrsula Iguarán, the Buendía matron, on whose shoulders the endurance of the family lies; the seventeen Aurelianos fathered by José Arcadio Buendía; the foreboding prostitute Pilar Ternera; rebellious niñas such as Santa Sofía de la Piedad; Indian servants; and the turcos, Middle Eastern immigrants.
The novel is about memory and forgetfulness, about the trials and tribulations of capitalism in a colonial society, about European explorers in the New World, about the clash of science and faith, about matriarchy as an institution, about loyalty, treason, and vengeance in the political arena, about the path that a rivulet of blood takes after a tragic death, about the flora and fauna of the Caribbean, about mishaps in urban planning, about the fancifulness of names in Spanish-speaking culture (Quick: how many Aurelianos are there?), about the difference between official and popular history, about intelligence and stupidity not as counterparts but as extensions of each other. It manages to build a self-sufficient Leibnitzian universe, one paralleling our own. Personally, I can’t think of a more luminous, if demanding, read.
The legend of how García Márquez’s book came to be is in itself enchanting. He and his wife Mercedes were driving to Acapulco, on the Mexican Pacific coast, when suddenly he was visited (like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, after an opium dream, shaped “Kubla Khan”) by the muse of fiction. He turned the car around and isolated himself in his Mexico City study until he finished the manuscript. In his description of the experience, he comes across less as an artist than as a scribe, as if One Hundred Years of Solitude had been dictated to him from first to last. The English translation by Gregory Rabassa is superb, maybe even better than the original. García Márquez has said as much. He even called Rabassa “the best Latin American writer in the English language.”
Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude got me hooked on literature, prompting me to understand its metabolism: how it works, why it matters, who produces it and who reads it, what the connection is between history and fiction, between what is true and what is a lie. It inspired me to become a cultural critic. As I’ve traveled through life, intellectually as well as existentially, I’ve always had my copy of the novel nearby. It has been a center of gravity, my raison d’être as a reader.
It is clear that contemporary literature owes much to García Márquez: his visions, his discipline.
But he transcends literature: García Márquez was a crucial protagonist in the major events of the second half of the twentieth century, in Colombia in particular and in Latin America in general. From the 1948 riots sparked by the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, known as El Bogotazo, to Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution in 1958–59, from El Boom itself to the neo-liberal economic policies that defined the eighties, from the emergence of a fresh type of journalism to the war against the Colombian drug cartels, from a new Latin American cinema to the project of simplifying Spanish orthography, García Márquez has been a larger-than-life force.
Biography as a literary genre wasn’t as popular in the Spanish-speaking world as it has been in its English-language counterpart. Not until the seventies did publishers invest in biographies as marketable items. This reluctance was due, in part, to the Latin American psyche. Latin Americans are not fond of confessing their sins in public. The act of revealing oneself is rather private. Not surprisingly, the heirs of the estates of political and cultural luminaries tended to shy away from allowing the secret lives of the departed made accessible to the public. This doesn’t mean that biographies were inexistent prior to that time. The seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, for instance, wrote a denunciatory letter defending her behavior from calumnies propagated by her male superiors in the Catholic Church. But these scant biographies are the exception to the rule.
In recent decades, literary biographies written in Spanish have multiplied in the hands of Iberian publishers. There are several on Borges, a couple on Mario Vargas Llosa, and one on García Márquez himself. None strike me as rigorous enough. In English, there is a handful on Borges, among others. I have written this book as a biographical investigation with an English-language reader in mind. I wouldn’t have embarked on it had I not become aware of the pleasures the genre provides in the hands of practitioners like Leon Edel, whose multivolume life of Henry James is a tour de force—better even than James’s own tranquil life at his desk.
The traditional biographer—like James Boswell whose meticulous work ethic is derived from a Protestant sensibility—is eager to record everything, including minutiae, to squeeze the meaning out of a subject’s every thought and action, to dissect a person’s behavior for the sake of posterity. In a sense, the methodical biographer is akin to a vampire, sucking the subject’s blood. Or better yet, like a dybbuk, inhabiting his body and soul, walking, eating, and dreaming with him at all times. These images may be grotesque, but they are not altogether inaccurate. By choice, the biographer doesn’t quite surrender his own self in order to become someone else. What he does is gather all the possible ingredients of another person’s existence and retrace his journey from one point to another. Needless to say, the biographer’s subjectivity is constantly in question. It is his vision of el otro, the suspect’s path as interpreted by the fastidious detective. The best meditation I know on the biographer’s quest is Julio Cortázar’s novella The Pursuer, about the impossible attempt to pin down a fictional jazz master whose profile resembles that of Charlie Parker.
Other biographies are punctilious in their delivery of even the most anodyne detail. My quest is not to accumulate facts, for data isn’t knowledge. I am most interested in the background to One Hundred Years of Solitude: what prompted it and what were the conditions under which it was gestated? In other words, I am after the raw material of literature. Where does a writer find his inspiration? How does he transform life into fiction? My interest is at once on García Márquez’s personal travels and in the historical backdrop against which that traveling unfolded.
This biography of Gabriel García Márquez covers a little over four decades, from his birth in 1927 in the small Caribbean coastal town of Aracataca in Colombia to 1970, when Rabassa’s English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was released by Harper & Row in the United States, three years after its explosive publication in Latin America. I trace the author’s journey against the tapestry of the principal historical, ideological, and cultural events that shaped Latin America during that period. He lived in almost a dozen places, mostly for extended periods, including Aracataca, Barranquilla, Bogotá, Cartagena, Barcelona, Paris, and Mexico. For most of that time García Márquez was, to a large extent, an unknown newspaper reporter and columnist, as well as a screenwriter. He was astoundingly prolific, publishing sundry pieces, sometimes at a bi-weekly rate, if not more often. He built an enviable reputation as an imaginative journalist. But it was in García Márquez’s short fiction—stories and novellas, some of which were first published in periodicals—where his true talent emerged. In these pieces the fabulous universe of Macondo and its inhabitants slowly took shape. Equally significant was the way in which he devised a carefully calibrated style (in the words of a reviewer, with García Márquez, every sentence is a surprise and the surprise is, in general, “really an extension of our knowledge or feeling about life, and not simply a trick”) and plots that were unique to his native environment. It wasn’t until after he turned forty that his fortune radically changed, though not always for the better. García Márquez is known to have resented the merciless scrutiny fame brought to his private life. My narrative concludes at that point.
In writing this biography, I follow García Márquez almost at every turn of his journey. I pore over his journalistic efforts in newspapers, such as El Heraldo (Barranquilla), El Independiente (Bogotá), El Universal (Cartagena), El Tiempo (Bogotá), and El Espectador (Bogotá), and magazines like Elite (Caracas). These took the form of news reports, political, social, and cultural commentary, travel writing, and chronicles of exceptional events, such as the miraculous survival of a sailor lost at sea for twenty-eight days. This account, serialized as “The Story of a Shipwreck,” scandalized Bogotá in the mid-fifties.
I explore his connection with El grupo de Barranquilla, a cadre of dilettantes (writers, photographers, dancers) who orbited around Ramón Vinyes, known as El sabio catalán, or the wise Catalan, with whom he forged a lasting friendship. Some of them, such as Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Álvaro Mutis, and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, are essential to understanding García Márquez’s Colombian footing and his transition to the European, Cuban, and Mexican periods. I study his connection to the Cartagena intelligentsia. I survey his sexual escapades and focus on his courtship of Mercedes Barcha Prado, his lifelong wife, whom he met at a high-school dance when he was nineteen and she thirteen. I examine his debt to William Faulkner and the influence Borges had on his oeuvre. I scrutinize the writer’s block he experienced in the early sixties and his discovery of Juan Rulfo’s fiction, which triggered the creative output that resulted in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I consider the camaraderie he forged with other Spanish-language writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and, to a lesser extent, Julio Cortázar, a connection that benefited them as a group in marketing terms but was put to the test by polarizing ideological issues in the late seventies. Unlike his literary colleagues, García Márquez was a costeño with an acute sense of place, someone who had traveled far beyond his humble origins without ever truly leaving them behind.
A crucial aspect in García Márquez’s early years is his collaboration with Mexican filmmakers. Starting with his friendship with Mutis—who in turn was an acquaintance of Luis Buñuel—he slowly created partnerships with directors, producers, and actors that allowed him to be involved in a number of important movie projects, the most significant of which were El gallo de oro and Tiempo de morir. The impact of these experiences on García Márquez seemed enormous. Not only are screenplays and other cinematic collaborations an essential component of his oeuvre but, to a large extent, his style was shaped by his exposure to the screen, both as spectator and screenwriter.
In short, One Hundred Years of Solitude is my aleph. I quote from it to shed light on García Márquez’s life and vice versa. I’m enthralled by the way it isn’t only a novel; it is a bitácora, an account of the most decisive events in Colombia until the sixties. It is also a retelling of the Bible, a summation of the painful colonial past of Latin America, and an autobiographical chronicle of García Márquez’s friendship with important figures of the time. I pay as much attention to its inception as I do to the rezeptiongeschichte. I cover how the book is received in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, but especially in the United States, where García Márquez’s posthumous reputation was forever cemented with the publication of Rabassa’s translation.
To intellectuals in Latin America, García Márquez is a polemical figure. A close friend of Fidel Castro, for years he defended the Cuban Revolution against charges of censorship, corruption, and xenophobia. For scores of young writers, his influence has been both a blessing and a curse. Such is the power of his fiction that successive generations of writers have lived under his shadow, constantly asked to produce narratives with a magical realism bent, even when this style is alien to them. This love-hate relationship is palpable as a reaction to what has come to be known as Macondismo, a concept—or better, a full-fledge ideology—understood to be an index of continental, national, and regional validation. To be a Macondista is to celebrate Latin America as “undecipherable, beyond the code, and as a place whose very disjunctions are, in and of themselves, identifying characteristics.”1 The ambivalence is tangible in the literary movement known as McOndo, which came about in the eighties and promoted the work of young voices, such as those of Alberto Fuguet and Edmundo Paz-Soldán. The movement’s name was a refutation of Latin America as a geography populated by Macondos: provincial towns in the middle of the jungle, besieged by epidemics of insomnia.2
The McOndista narratives were defined by hyper-realists à la Raymond Carver. They were about urban life, included a dose of crime and drugs, made constant references to popular culture, and addressed issues of globalization and sexuality. In an essay published in Salon.com, entitled “I am not a magic realist!” Fuguet stated: “Unlike the ethereal world of García Márquez’s imaginary Macondo, my own world is something much closer to what I call ‘McOndo’—a world of McDonald’s, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-politicized, young, apolitical writers are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences. Living in cities all over South America, hooked on cable TV (CNN en español), addicted to movies and connected to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeño-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape.”
Parricide is an essential part of the process of growing up. The classics are references in opposition to which younger writers define themselves. However, García Márquez’s towering reputation has only heightened with time. Will there come a period when his aesthetics are totally eclipsed? I believe that, like Cervantes, his standing is secure for the ages. While he will surely continue to be attacked, One Hundred Years of Solitude is an irreplaceable piece in the Latin American cultural puzzle. It contains the DNA of its people.
A word about names and the sequential approach I take. To keep my objective distance, I refer to my subject as García Márquez and not as the overly familiar Gabo, or even the diminutive Gabito. I also avoid referring to the author as Márquez, as many in the English-speaking world are wont to do. Such simplification is an outright aggression to Hispanic onomastics. People in Spanish-language countries often have not one but two or three names. The popular singer José Antonio Jiménez doesn’t go by José, nor is he known as Tony. Likewise with patronymics: Mario Vargas Llosa isn’t Llosa to his readers in Lima. García Márquez always uses his two last names, the former referring to his paternal heritage, the latter to his maternal one. To drop one of them is a sign of laziness. I have respected the way names are articulated in interviews and newspaper clippings.
As for the chronology of events, I follow the biographer’s mantra that a life lived and a life narrated must parallel each other. In other words, I move from García Márquez’s childhood until the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude in a linear fashion. I deviate from it only to give a general picture—historical, social, and cultural—of the environment in which García Márquez moved. And I interrupt the sequence when discussing the reception of his work in the English-speaking world. For instance, La hojarasca appeared in Spanish, in book form, in 1955, but the English translation was published only in 1972. To avoid needless repetition, I discuss the volume’s reception in Spanish and in English in the same section.
In October 1982, several months after my discovery of One Hundred Years of Solitude in a reading marathon that began one rainy April afternoon, I read the triumphant headline of the daily newspaper Unomásuno: “
Gabo gana el Nobel!” The Swedish Academy in Stockholm had awarded García Márquez the Nobel Prize in Literature. The jubilation in Mexico City was uncontainable. There were special book editions. Literary supplements published entire issues dedicated to his odyssey, with comments by luminaries splashed everywhere. A new novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, had been released the year prior and was still topping best-seller charts.
His prize made Latin America feel proud. García Márquez was the fourth Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Prior to him the recipients were Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Pablo Neruda. They were recognized for giving voice to the people through their art. García Márquez was singled out “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” Seldom does the prize feel right, not only in the writer of choice but in the time of choice. That year, it most certainly did.
It was then that I came to recognize a phenomenon I call Gabolatría: the unstoppable need to adore García Márquez. This unofficial biography isn’t one of its vicissitudes. Unlike hundreds of adulatory exercises published in the Hispanic world, where literary criticism doesn’t thrive as a democratic activity and, thus, hagiography continues to be one of the cheap forms of reverence, this biography doesn’t shy away from presenting an analytical view of García Márquez’s life and career. After all, the task of the critic, as Mathew Arnold once put it, is to look at art as a manifestation of the complex forces that define us all the time.